I work from the here-and-now experience in the room with patients to understand enacted relational patterns and their historical origins. I believe that while all of us struggle with challenging, painful experiences, our response to suffering and the meanings we attach to it and to ourselves as a result, can contribute to problematic relational patterns. Compassion and self acceptance are extremely helpful in the process of relinquishing these problematic patterns and moving beyond them. True compassion, however, is elusive for most people and many are helped by achieving a richer understanding of the origins of their patterns in the quest for greater empathy for themselves as human beings. This understanding facilitates the process of acceptance, greater consciousness and personal development. I see each patient as a unique individual with a complex fabric of genetic predisposition, attachment history, as well as a multitude of experiences and generated meanings about these experiences. In my work with couples, gay as well as heterosexual, I explore the current relational dynamics to help uncover the historical origins for each partner as well as to better understand how these dynamics interact in the fabric of their current relationship.